Copperhead No. 404, 1990/2025 by Moyra Davey

Copperhead No. 404, 1990/2025C-print, tape, postage, and ink18″ × 12″ Unique (11 Versions) For more information, please write to zack@canopycanopycanopy.com. Following the stock market crash of 1987, Moyra Davey started collecting one-cent coins found on the streets of New York and photographing them with a macro lens. “I’d just moved to New York, had no money, and was thinking a lot about the psychology of money,” Davey writes in Copperheads (Bywater Brothers Editions, 2010). Zoomed in on Abraham Lincoln’s profile in relief, the works in the series seek less to monumentalize the lowest denomination of American currency—even as it faces discontinuation—than to draw attention to the physical records of the coin’s circulation: gashes, oxidation, dents, and stains. The Copperheads series asks how and why value is assigned to particular currencies, objects, and artworks. As Davey notes, “I thought of the Copperheads in some way as my own counterfeit, a deeply satisfying reverie of self-s